The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (29 page)

Joe was an angry, cynical man who still might lash out in vitriol against Roosevelt and his third term. His greatest vulnerability lay not in the many things he hated but in the few things he loved. The man loved his sons, and it was of his sons that Roosevelt spoke now.

“I stand in awe of your relationship with your children,” Roosevelt said in his first words of the evening that rang with some semblance of truth. “For a man as busy as you are, it is a rare achievement. And I for one will do all I can to help you if your boys should ever run for political office.”

A promise is sometimes only another name for a threat. According to Roosevelt’s son James, the president went on to say that if Joe decided to throw his lot in with Willkie now and abandon the president, he would be an outcast and his sons’ political careers would be destroyed before they began.

Years later Joe told Clare Luce that Roosevelt offered him an irresistible deal that evening: if Joe would endorse Roosevelt in 1940, “then he would support my son Joe for governor of Massachusetts in 1942.” Even if Roosevelt did not make such an explicit offer, the implications were clear that if Joe cared about his sons’ futures, he had best be quiet. A year and a half later Jack declared in a conversation that “his father’s greatest mistake was not talking enough; that he stopped too quickly and was accused of being an appeaser. He stated that the reason his father stopped talking and didn’t go on and present his side of the question fully was due to the fact that he believed it might hurt his two sons later in politics.”

The evening had not changed Joe’s belief that Roosevelt was slowly manipulating the country into war. Joe could have walked out of the White
House that evening, flown back to New York to meet the Luces, and cast his lot with Willkie. If the Republican won, Joe would be the man who had dared to stand up and say what had to be said.

Roosevelt had just promised that he would get rid of Joe’s enemies, and if momentarily Joe had believed him, upon reflection he was too shrewd to think that the president would change. But his love for his sons outweighed even his own ambition for power and position. He was not going to give them a tainted name as their inheritance or hobble them in the race of life.

What he was about to do was as noble and selfless as anything he would do in his life. His sons were not unaware of the sacrifice their father made that evening. Afterward Jack discussed his father with his friend Torby Macdonald. Torby wrote Jack that few people realized that “self-success” was more important than “worldly success,” and that Jack’s father was one of the few who had done so by “putting family over Ambassadorship.”

“A
ll right,” Joe finally said that night, giving in to Roosevelt’s request that he make a radio speech. “I will. But I will pay for it myself, show it to nobody in advance, and say what I wish.”

Joe spoke Tuesday evening on CBS Radio like the bearer of truth from the bloody fields of war. For months he had been saying privately that Roosevelt was leading America into war; now he stated that “such a charge is false.”

Joe knew that many of those listening across the nation had heard of his disagreements with Roosevelt, and he did not deny them but asked how many employees agreed completely with their employer. “In my years of service for the government, both at home and abroad, I have sought to have honest judgment as my goal,” he said. “After all, I have a great stake in this country. My wife and I have given nine hostages to fortune. Our children and your children are more important than anything else in the world.”

Joe had touched the deepest chord within his own life, a chord that resonated in the lives of most Americans. His speech was a triumph, lauded in the press and applauded by Democratic politicians. In the end Roosevelt won in an electoral landslide, and Joe’s speech was not the seminal event that it would have seemed in a close election. Joe, however, in one great public moment, had proved his fealty to Roosevelt. He had good reason to believe that his sons would be rewarded for their father’s loyalty.

Roosevelt saluted him, but the Luces and the Willkie forces considered Joe a betrayer. “There was that radio address when everyone thought he was going to come out for Willie,” Henry Luce recalled. “We thought he was and Clare tried to get hold of him and he wouldn’t answer the phone. We were appalled when he came out for FDR as the man to keep us out of war.”

On Saturday after the election, Joe’s secretary showed Louis Lyons of the
Boston Globe
and two reporters from the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
into his suite at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston. Joe was in suspenders, eating apple pie, having a casual morning on a casual day.

In London, Joe had become used to calling the press into his office and spewing out his most intemperate attack on his enemies, knowing that the scribes would cut his remarks down to fit into the narrow confines of acceptable discourse.

Joe believed his remarks this morning were not to be printed, but it was a mad gamble to talk as he did to journalists whom he did not know intimately, betraying all the glorious rhetoric of the radio speech he had just given. He said nothing that he had not said a hundred times before, that “democracy is all finished in England” and “it may be here” as well. He prophesied that if America entered the war, “everything we hold dear would be gone.”

Joe had learned little in London about the necessary parameters of diplomacy, and he took unseemly pleasure in speaking the unspeakable. He laced his diatribe with wildly inappropriate comments on everyone from Queen Elizabeth (“more brains than the Cabinet”) to Eleanor Roosevelt (“She bothered us more on our jobs in Washington to take care of the poor little nobodies who hadn’t any influence than all the rest of the people down there altogether”).

The story that appeared the next day, November 10, 1940, in the
Boston Globe
finished off whatever effectiveness Joe still had in London and destroyed whatever residue of trust Roosevelt might still have had in his ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Joe submitted a letter of resignation and retreated to Palm Beach.

He did not sit in Florida playing and replaying the scenes of his life in London, trying to pick out where he had gone wrong. Devoid of self-criticism, Joe was even more convinced of the correctness of his views, and more determined to struggle against what he considered his and the nation’s implacable enemy, the internationalists who were wooing America toward the crimson fields of war.

10
Child of Fortune, Child of Fate

J
oe had tied his two eldest sons to himself so tightly and with so many entanglements that to be men they had to sever the bonds to break free. Yet in doing so they risked falling into an abyss. Success was the tightest knot that bound them. Few fathers did as much for their sons as Joe did for his, and few fathers demanded more of his children.

Joe inscribed their names on a contract that they had not seen. He gave them privilege, opportunity, and wealth. In return, they would have to be among the great men of their time. They could not have inheritors’ pale lives, measuring out their days in games and chitchat at their clubs, envied for their lives of pleasure and revered for nothing except their good fortune.

Joe had marked off the high road to manhood that his sons must travel. Joe Jr. marched proudly up the middle, far ahead of his younger brother. When Joe Jr. looked back and saw Jack coming up behind him, it irritated him. Jack’s thesis “seemed to represent a lot of work but did not prove anything,” Joe Jr. jealously wrote his father when he first read it. Despite what his brother might say, Jack kept walking ahead, occasionally wandering off onto strange byways, but always returning to continue up the same arduous pathway.

Jack, not Joe Jr., had written
Why England Slept,
winning the first major laurels of adult life. Yet he did not have the imposing dignity and presence that Joe Jr. could don like evening clothes and shuck just as easily. Jack was twenty-three years old, though he looked far younger. He had the same sloppy nonchalance about his wardrobe that he had about the world. His boyish insouciance may have been irresistible to women but hardly marked him as a future leader.

At times Jack talked about becoming a journalist. He could have parlayed
his book and its stellar reviews into a position that would have been the envy of his friends at the
Harvard Crimson.
He thought about law, but that was a tedious regimen at best, and he could not face the prospect, especially with his star-crossed health. Instead, after graduating from Harvard, he decided in the fall to go out to northern California to study at Stanford University. He would be a nondegree student, able to pick his way through whatever courses took his fancy.

In late September 1940, Jack took a small apartment at The Cottage, a modest complex popular among graduate students. “Still can’t get used to the Co-eds,” he wrote Lem, “but am … taking it very slow as do not want to be known as the beast of the East.” That aspect of Stanford had its unique appeal to the handsome heir. It was a tonic watching the book-toting, chattering coeds hurry across the quad in their obligatory silk stockings.

Jack may have been unformed in other parts of his life, but he had established his adult sex life. His bad back required him to sleep on a bed board. That was an ideal excuse to have women do what he wanted them to do.

“Because of his back he preferred making love with the girl on top,” recalled Susan Imhoff, one of the first coeds to make a visit to Jack’s room at The Cottage. “He found it more stimulating to have the girl do all the work. I remember he didn’t enjoy cuddling after making love, but he did like to talk and had a wonderful sense of humor—he loved to laugh.”

Jack had a taste for gloriously attractive, smart women, but as eagerly as they entered into their affairs with him, they usually left with a sense of disquiet. They may have had other affairs that did not end well, but there was something deeply unsettling about Jack. He swept down on women, wooing them with his charm and wit, and then flew off again, never having been touched, leaving only a whiff of emotion.

Jack was no crude predator who lured women to his room, but a sly, sophisticated gamesman who seduced by seeming not to seduce. Once a woman succumbed, he quickly and efficiently disposed of the matter. As much as he might pretend otherwise, the fact that a woman slept with him showed that she was no better than all the others. “I’m not interested—once I get a woman,” he told his Stanford friend Henry James. “I like the conquest. That’s the challenge. I like the contest between male and female—that’s what I like. It’s the chase I like—not the kill!”

Jack pursued one coed, Harriet “Flip” Price, more than any of the others. Harriet was beautiful, intelligent, wellborn, and athletic. For all his desire to score yet another conquest, Jack was not the sort to promise eternal fidelity or to vow that when he looked into Harriet’s eyes he heard wedding bells. They laughed and joked together and had sweet good times riding around in Jack’s new Buick convertible.

As much as Jack wooed her, and as much as she felt herself “wildly in love,” Harriet would not sleep with him. Virginity was part of her capital. She was not going to exchange it for anything less than marriage. Beneath it all, they shared the belief that marriage was too serious a business to leave solely to the whims of romance. “I think Jack knew what he was doing all the time,” Harriet recalled. “And I think he knew exactly what kind of woman he wanted to marry, and did exactly what he set out to do.” And so, indeed, did Harriet.

Jack hid from Harriet how troubled he was about his health, though he could hardly disguise the fact that after an hour of driving his back hurt so much that he had to stop for a while. Jack was chosen high in the draft in October 1940. He was fully aware of the irony of what a war it would be if it were fought with the likes of him. “This draft has caused me a lot of concern,” he wrote Lem in November. “They will never take me into the army, and yet if I don’t it will look quite bad. I may be able to work out some sort of thing.” He understood that his very manhood was at stake, and he could not sit on the curb waving a flag while other young men paraded off to war.

Jack often did not show up for class and rarely participated in discussions, and by that measure he appeared little more than a silly dilettante and playboy. Harriet saw that beneath the veneer of frivolity and merciless wit Jack was deeply concerned with the world around him. He struggled to forge his own ideas, and in doing so he struggled for an identity apart from and beyond his father.

Joe was a fierce and powerful force who gave no quarter. “When I hear these mental midgets [in the United States] talking about my desire for appeasement and being critical of it, my blood fairly boils,” Joe wrote Jack in September, as if to say that if his son veered from Joe’s truth he too would shrink to nothing in his father’s estimation. “What is this war going to prove?”

Jack was at an age when most men have resolved their feelings about their parents, but he talked to Harriet endlessly about Joe. “He talked about his father’s infidelities,” she recalled. “I think his father was a tremendous influence. I don’t think there’s any question about that, but not all to the good! It seemed to me that his father’s obvious rather low opinion of his wife and the way he treated her, that some of that rubbed off on Jack. He wasn’t mean or anything about his mother, but I think that denigration, that came from the father rubbed off on the son. And that’s where all the womanizing and everything came from!”

Jack’s relationship with his father was changing, evolving into a far more complicated bond than what Joe had with his other sons. Jack no longer simply mimicked his father’s behavior and ideas. After Joe’s selfdestructive

candor with the
Boston Globe,
Jack began work on a document suggesting how his father should reply to his critics. Joe pressured him as he would any subordinate. WHEN WILL OUTLINE ON THAT APPEASEMENT ARTICLE BE READY REGARDS JOSEPH KENNEDY, he cabled Jack from Palm Beach early in December.